It was an average Sunday afternoon for Barney Hyams in the southern New South Wales town of Batlow until he suddenly heard what he thought was a loud explosion.
“I was just talking to some guys up the road and we just heard a loud boom and the whole building actually moved,” he said.
“You could feel the ground underneath you sort of moving. We couldn’t determine whether it was an explosion or an earth tremor.”
Barney Hyams says it is “pretty scary” to have a quake so near to a major dam wall. (ABC News)
Geoscience Australia confirmed the loud boom was a magnitude-2.9 earthquake in Tumut, about 30 minutes from where Mr Barney lives, that occurred just before 1pm.
Geoscience Australia said its website received 34 reports of tremors.
No damage was reported, but Mr Hyams was concerned about surrounding infrastructure.
“At the epicentre of it, which was only about probably 5 kilometres from our property, is reasonably close to Blowering Dam wall. It’s pretty scary when you have an earthquake near a major dam wall like that,” he said.
Blowering is one of the largest inland dams in NSW and supplies vital irrigation across the Riverina region.
Blowering Dam feeds the Tumut River and supplies the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. (Supplied: Water NSW)
WaterNSW Spokesperson Tony Weber said the risk to the concrete dam was very low.
“These dams are designed to withstand seismic activity well in excess of what was experienced at Tumut and at the site of Blowering,” he said.
Mr Weber said tests done by site engineers following the quake showed the measurement of the scale of impact was 3, which was considered “too low” to undertake any immediate inspections.
“If there was rattling on your shelf or [items] falling off your shelf at [a measurement of] 5 or above, in that case we would have said, ‘Let’s drop everything and do some inspections.'”
History of earthquakes
Geoscience Australia senior seismologist Jonathan Bathgate said there had been a number of earthquakes of a similar magnitude in the region over the last few years, including a magnitude-2.5 earthquake in 2022, a 1.8 in 2014 and a 2.3 in 2007.
“It is an area that has a history of some small earthquakes of this size,” he said.
Broken Hill also experienced a magnitude-3 earthquake on Sunday night at 7pm.
The outback city recorded a total of seven earthquakes in 2025, the most in its recorded history.
Data from Geoscience Australia shows there have been 62 earthquakes in NSW over the last year and 777 over the last 10 years.
Geoscience Australia data shows there have been 62 earthquakes in NSW over the last year. (Geoscience Australia)
Mr Bathgate said the frequency was not “unusual”.
“There have been some bigger earthquakes in the region, but Australia gets more than 100 magnitude-3 earthquakes across the country each year,” he said.
Mr Bathgate said the loud explosion that Mr Hyams and other locals experienced was a “common experience”.
“It’s a short movement along the fault, which presents as one short and sharp jolt and a bang, depending on the atmospheric conditions that reverberate off low cloud and appear louder,” Mr Bathgate said.
“Because they are so short in duration, it just presents as one loud bang and there’s no ongoing shaking or rumbling, as you get with larger earthquakes.”
